The Rant in Our Stars

[Norman Humann]

Didn't see the movie, didn't read the book. I'm allergic to anything marketed towards me.

[Faith No More]

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Oh, sure, but what I'm wondering is are there any quality authors that have intended to write good literary works that are geared towards the young adult crowd or is the genre simply full of mediocre authors.

JK Rowling
EB White ("Charlotte's Web")
Laura Ingles Wilder ("Little House" series)
Philip Pullman ("His Dark Materials" Trilogy)
SE Hinton ("The Outsiders")
Jeanne DuPrau ("Book of Ember" Trilogy)
Kevin J Anderson (An entire series of Young Jedi Knights)
Sherman Alexie ("The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian")
Louisa May Alcott ("Little Women")
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Anne Frank
Katherine Paterson ("Bridge to Teribithia")
Richard Adams ("Watership Down")
Brian Jacques ("Redwall" and its sequels)
Motherfuckin' Tolkien (The Hobbit was a children's book, and the Lord of the Rings started out that way)
CS Lewis (Narnia)
John Christopher ("When the Tripods Came")
Harper Lee ("To Kill a Mockingbird")
Ellen Raskin ("The Westing Game")
LM Montgomery ("Anne of Green Gables" series, "The Emily" Trilogy etc)
Lois Lowry ("The Giver")
Madeleine L'Engle ("A Wrinkle in Time," etc)
Lemony Snicket ("A Series of Unfortunate Events")
Lewis Carroll ("Alice in Wonderland")
Robin McKinley ("The Hero and the Crown" as well as several amazing fairytale retellings, including two very different but equally brilliant rewrites of Beauty & the Beast)
Roald Dahl (Do you really need me to list those?)
L Frank Baum ("The Wizard of Oz" series)
Frances Hodgson Burnett ("The Little Princess" and "The Secret Garden")
Norton Juster ("The Phantom Tollbooth")

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We can keep going.

Ah, it's all coming back to me now. Some of those arguably aren't YA books, but your list has triggered some memories. Roald Dahl was great(really interesting, too, considering he didn't really care for children), but now I'm remembering that the majority of the YA books that I read that I enjoyed were depressing as all hell. I remember my mom reading Charlotte's Web to me when I was six and bawling my eyes out.

[thesummerqueen]

Don't even talk to me about "Where the Red Fern Grows".

[Clueless Morgan]

To Stealth:
Sounds like you enjoyed the movie only slightly less than I enjoyed the book (I haven't seen the movie). I had heard that it was a really great, very profound book, that it was deeply reflective and moving and makes you examine your own life and blah, blah, blah...

Consequently, my expectations weren't that high.

The book was over-hyped for me; I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't heard all the hype talking it up.

The one positive that I will give this book was that Hazel goes on and on at one point about the end of her favorite book - the one with the pretentious name I can't remember. She talks about how the book ends mid-narrative, like the character just stopped writing, maybe because she died or something, which is the impetus for going to visit the author so it must have made it to the movie. I ended up convincing myself that TFIOS was going to end the same way. It was transparent to me that Augustus would die, but I thought Hazel would die and the narrative would just end, too. In that respect, well done to the author for misleading me there.

Otherwise it was just an okay book for me. It ranks higher than My Sister's Keeper, which I have both read (hated it) and watched (hated that they "fixed" the thing I hated about the book :p)

Unlike Twilight, I can see how people could like this book so it doesn't bother me that it became popular. There's nothing redeeming about Twilight.

Has the YA genre ever been anything but garbage? I don't remember ever reading something in the YA that I liked, but admittedly, I didn't read too much of them, either. When I was a teenager, I just read the old adult books.

I read YA horror (the Fear Street books by RL Stein) and remember loving them. Teenagers killing each other and my parents let me read about it? Awesome!

Other than those, I, also, graduated to adult novels fairly young.